Ipswich trials Autonomy decision support

Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust is to be the first in the UK to trial Autonomy’s Auminence software; which is described as ‘meaning based technology’ and provides clinicians with decision support.

It will run alongside the trust’s iSoft’s iCM patient administration system and Kainos’ Evolve electronic document management system; for which Ipswich is the beacon site.

Deirdre O’Neill, head of the Evolve healthcare division at Kainos, told eHealth Insider the trial of Auminence will give clinicians a better understanding of patient history and needs.

“I think it would be fair to say it gives trusts a way to analyse the rich source of Evolve data they have; it gives them a better understanding,” she said.

Kainos has been developing Evolve at Ipswich, where it went live in November 2009.

It has agreed an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement with Autonomy to integrate Autonomy Records Management and Autonomy Business Process Management into the system.

The records management includes a data repository and the business process management automates processes such as e-forms.

“Really what the [re-seller agreement] means is that there is a lot of commitment between Autonomy and Kainos, and that should give our customers a lot of confidence,” said O’Neill.

Clinicians in Ipswich currently use Evolve to access patient information pulled from iCM, the trust’s radiology and pathology systems, and documents held within the system.

The Evolve repository now contains patient data for more than 580,000 patients and 877,000 records, with a further 50,000 pages of paper notes being scanned on-site into the system weekly.

An Autonomy spokesperson said: “Auminence is a software tool that uniquely understands the meaning within all healthcare data, including the patient’s history, symptoms, clinical information, medical research and other ‘human friendly’ healthcare information.

“It provides the clinician with a checklist of possible diagnoses and suggested treatment plans for them to consider, in real time.

“Auminence comes pre-configured with publicly available medical data. The Evolve Auminence trial at Ipswich will involve Auminence being configured to access the specific data for Ipswich patients currently stored in Evolve.

“Clinicians will continue to use Evolve, but it will be extended to enable them to query Auminence, enabling them to make better, data-driven diagnosis decisions.”

The Auminence trial began this month and will run until October. Neil Turnball, head of programme delivery in IM&T, said the trust is looking to establish whether Auminence can be another tool to improve the quality of patient care.

“We are excited to be at the forefront of the important new breakthroughs we have recently experienced with Evolve,” he said.

“Auminence may be able to analyse healthcare data and provide information about diagnoses and treatment plans to assist clinicians.”